EAT, one of the UK’s high street sandwich makers, is using Excel-killer Anaplan to help with its expansion plans.
The chain currently operates around 100 shops throughout the country, but by using financial planning and analysis platform Anaplan, EAT says it will expand "two to three shops a period" whilst keeping its finances in check.
Initiated in January 2014, EAT financial director Strahan Wilson told CBR that the platform was able to be rolled out in a very short period of time, and the benefits were clearly visible by the end of EAT’s fiscal year in June.
Wilson said that old spreadsheet systems were challenging and "slow and convoluted", and with an expanding number of sandwich shops would come an expanding number of Excel rows.
"We’d end up with spreadsheets that were multiple megabytes," Wilson said.
It takes three core EAT employees to run a planning model with nearly 800 million populated cells to capture sales by product, by week and calculate all the costs by year, by week and by store. Anaplan is also used by the EAT reporting team to pull actual monthly reports that go into their management and executive boards.
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